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Monday, September 3, 2007

Meadowlands Socks ver. 1.0

The sock pattern for the SOS Design Contest needed a name, so after due consideration of Linnaean Latin, pop culture, literary references, and utilitarian titles, I finally picked an evocative New Jersey place name: Meadowlands. It's my first formal, write-it-all-out-and-convert-to-.pdf pattern. Here's two versions standing in [cough] my unmowed backyard a New Jersey meadow. Thanks to the recent rain and pleasant temperatures, my lawn meadow is surprisingly green and lush for the end of summer – usually it's rather brown.

(Shh!... Don't tell the knitting police, but I don't yet have a pair. At least this time I shaved my legs and the mosquito bites are almost healed.)

Writing the pattern was, um, interesting. It ended up being nine pages long! While the sock is an easy, intuitive knit, its Cedar architecture is so different from the ordinary that it takes a bit of explanation. (Try explaining intuition. Gah.) The first draft was considerably terser.

My two main sources were a Japanese stitch dictionary, Knitting Patterns Book 250, and New Pathways for Sock Knitters by Cat Bordhi, who encourages use of her ideas. I like New Pathways so much, I've joined the knit-along.

I also spent some time looking at the Mon Tricot Knitting Encyclopedia, Knitting Without Tears by Elizabeth Zimmerman, Barbara Walker's A Treasury of Knitting 1 and 2, Mary Thomas's Knitting Book, Confessions of a Knitting Heretic by Annie Modesitt, and the mighty Principles of Knitting by June Hemmons Hiatt, which made me feel a little better about waxing prolix. Some things just take a lot of words.

The pattern includes charts, suggested variations, photographs, and even a little botanic Latin (I just had to sneak some in!). Alas, it does not offer multiple sizes. I wrote the pattern for a cast on of 64 stitches and started resizing it for a cast on of 48, 54, 72, and 80 stitches to accomodate different sizes of feet and different weights of yarn, but there wasn't sufficient time before the deadline to finish – only the 64-stitch sock is given. If there's sufficient interest, I'll add more sizes to ver. 2.0. Hm... that will make the pattern even longer. Must think of a way to save trees!

That's all for the future – for the moment the pattern is in the capable hands of the contest judges. It turns out that the SOS Design Contest needs at least four more entries to run and the submission deadline has been extended to September 8. Aiya! SOSers, get your patterns written up and submitted!